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Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery

Plastic surgery is not a modern phenomenon. It started over 400 years ago with a spate of botched nose jobs, so badly engineered that the nose would fall off if the wind blew too hard! Since then, surgeons have been entranced with the idea that not only could they fix the body, but now they could even fix our sense of self-esteem. From DIY face-lifts to heroic wartime reconstructive surgery, Michael Mosely undergoes 16th-century bondage and 21st-century botox in his journey to trace the bizarre history of plastic surgery.

These days transplant surgery saves thousands of lives every year and almost everything can be replaced: your heart, your lungs, your liver, your eyes, even your hands and face. But in the beginning transplants didn’t cure, they killed, because surgeons didn’t understand that they were taking on one of the most efficient killing systems we know of – the human immune system. This episode traces the story of transplant surgery from a 19th-century neo-nazi to the latest miraculous life and limb-saving operations.